Have BYOND provide a chat server that would be used to replace the pager and could be leveraged by game developers. This would provide BYOND users with real-time chat that could be accessed through the BYOND website or using an existing IM client. It'd also be something that BYOND game developers could use - each game instance could act as an IM client, allowing game players to communicate with other BYOND users in the same game, in different games, or not in a game at all.

You could set up an XMPP server, replace the pager's chat capability with Pidgin, and support communication between BYOND users and Google Talk/Gchat users.

Think about how neat it would be to have things like this happen:

One person downloads a BYOND game and starts playing it by themself. They like the game and decide to invite their friends to join. The game automatically opens a port for hosting and gives the player a byond:// link. The game's chat is connected to BYOND's chat server, so the user can send the byond:// link to their friends whether their friends are in a different game, are connected to another chat server (ex: gchat), or are using some other IM program (ex: Pidgin) that's connected to BYOND's chat server (among others).

Interfacing with other applications is most of the benefit. Instead of adding features to the pager, people can use existing IM clients that support the protocol (like Pidgin) to get whatever features they'd want. Aside from hosting the chat server, there's very little effort required.

It could also be integrated in BYOND games to allow for better communication between users. Kind of like what battle.net and Kongregate offer.

How would this be any different than what the pager already does? Aside from you expecting it to interface with external chat applications, or is that the only objective?

One other issue it would resolve is all of the people complaining about pager messages being so slow to receive. The pager uses a polling method to get new messages, where-as with an XMPP server it's purely push-style notifications of new events (chat). It would increase the bandwidth usage of the messaging part of BYOND, but it should make up for it easily in the saved bandwidth by not having to send world and friend data, which is zlib compressed most (if not all, I haven't checked) of the time and still huge.